by Kai Meyer
Jolly stared at him. The bridge stretched before her eyes—and with it the indescribable look into the sea of darkness. What had the shape changer said to her that time on the island? You are expected.
Now his words made sense. She shuddered. What if the kobalins hadn’t attacked? Would it then have been she who opened the gate to the masters? Would she have let catastrophe into the world? Munk was right, the kobalins had saved her from that fate.
Involuntarily she took a step backward, but Munk took a step forward.
Jolly blazed at him, “Don’t you understand what’s going on here, Munk? Don’t you see what the Maelstrom is doing to us? The same fate awaits us as the first polliwogs! He changed one of them into the Acherus—the same monster that killed your parents!” She rammed the words against him like a blade. “He used to be like us too. The Maelstrom intends to do the same thing with us. We’re supposed to help him, just not in the same form, but as slaves without will.” She almost clenched her fist around the mussels in her pouch in her anger. “Do you want to become like the Acherus? Do you really want that?”
Munk was silent for a moment, as if he were listening to new promptings in his mind, for an answer that someone else was giving him.
“I…,” he began, but he fell silent immediately when a second figure appeared behind him. She emerged from the raging column of the Maelstrom, as if the water itself had produced her. In the first moments Aina’s body was transparent, but it gained in color and consistency as she came closer.
Jolly felt as if the sea were freezing around her, she was suddenly so cold. Yet she’d expected that sooner or later someone…something in the shape of the girl would appear.
Aina’s image floated out of the Maelstrom, and at that moment the whirling wall opened for a second, like a curtain. Through the crack Jolly was able to get a brief look into the interior of the water column, a lightning-quick view straight into the soul of the Maelstrom.
There was nothing inside there except darkness, a night-black chasm of emptiness.
“Munk!” Jolly called imploringly before Aina was close enough to stop her. The sea of mussels on the ground beneath them appeared to vibrate, as though the aftershock of an earthquake raged underneath them. “She’s going to make both of us into slaves. You can’t want that.”
The Maelstrom girl was only a stone’s throw away. She needed no swimming strokes to come closer; she rode on a current that the roaring water column had sent out like a gust of wind.
Jolly crossed the distance to Munk in one instant. At first it looked as though he was going to draw back to avoid her, but then he kept floating in the same spot, holding her eyes with a visible effort. There was a pleading in his eyes that she didn’t want to see. She didn’t understand it, didn’t understand him.
She grabbed him by the upper arm. “Munk, please…she’s going to make something like the Acherus out of you. Out of us both.”
“She showed me that I belong here,” he said dully. “We’re polliwogs. The sea made us. And this is the place where the most magic veins cross.”
No, Jolly thought, that is not so. She’d seen with her own eyes the place where the veins began, and it wasn’t here. Nowhere else could so many strands of the magic come together than among the spinning stools of the three old women at the bottom of the sea. But how could she make him understand that? He hadn’t been there when she had; he didn’t know the water spinners. To explain to him that there was a corner of the ocean where even greater powers operated and where the true source of the polliwogs lay appeared impossible in view of the infernal scenery at his back.
Aina stopped beside them. Her lips opened, and Jolly was able to watch teeth and tongue developing behind her lips. She was taking shape only as necessary, not a moment too soon.
Why was the Maelstrom being so stingy with his power? Didn’t he have enough of it? Or had he used a major part of his strength in the battle for Aelenium? Was that why he was so bent on making use of their polliwog power? Jolly sucked a deep breath of water into her lungs. She might have this fact alone to thank that she was still alive: the Maelstrom needed her.
Jolly was becoming more and more excited, but she tried not to show it.
“Why are you resisting so hard?” asked Aina, and even her voice only became really her own as she continued to speak; the syllables developed from something vague and blurry into the voice of a girl. Was that carelessness because it was no longer necessary to deceive Jolly? Or did Aina really lack the strength?
As fascinating as this idea was, it made Jolly even more anxious. If her enemy were in a hurry to draw her to his side, he would strike quickly and brutally and not wait for her counterattack.
Aina’s features coagulated into a smile. “Munk has understood that his place is here at my side. Why do you resist that? The humans don’t want us polliwogs. They hate us.”
“You say that because they expelled you in the old time.”
“And what about all the polliwogs they killed? Why are you two the last ones still alive? Don’t you realize how stupid humans are? They lack any wide vision, any openness to the unknown. They fear what they don’t understand. They whisper about you behind your back, they point their fingers at you and think of ways to get rid of you when you’ve fulfilled your purpose. You may be trying not to let yourself notice, but secretly you know the truth.”
Jolly shook her head. “They accepted Munk and me and treated us like their own.”
“That’s not true,” contradicted Aina, looking at Munk as if she expected a confirmation from him.
After a short hesitation he nodded. “They always said that we’re different from them. They stared at us on the streets of Aelenium and whispered when we passed by.”
Jolly’s eyes grew cold. “And you enjoyed it, if I remember correctly. Lord God, Munk! You even tried to keep me there when I wanted to go to look for Bannon.”
“Because…” His voice became softer. “Because I didn’t want to stay there alone.”
“Because he was afraid,” said Aina. “Isn’t that how it was, Munk?”
He nodded hesitantly. “Yes.”
“Here in the Crustal Breach you need never be alone again. Here you are among your own kind.”
Jolly made a movement with her legs that drove her a short distance from Aina and Munk. “Munk,” she said imploringly. “She’s lying! She made the two polliwogs who followed her into her creatures. Into monsters!”
He didn’t reply, only chewed silently on his lower lip.
Aina altered her strategy, and now her face grew harder. Her voice took on a commanding tone, which warned Jolly that the time for discussion was running out. The Maelstrom was in a hurry, for reasons that she could still only guess.
“Aelenium has fallen,” said Aina. “There’s nothing more awaiting you up there.”
“If that were so, you wouldn’t need us,” retorted Jolly, suppressing the trembling in her voice. What if Aina spoke the truth? It simply must not be. “Aelenium is still fighting, that I know.”
“You saw what happened to the first sea star city. It went down and broke into thousands of pieces. Many people lost their lives, and so will it be again today. That was the first time they tried to imprison me, and they were almost clever enough—but at least I was able to destroy the city.” Aina stretched out her hand as if to touch Munk. “Show her whose side you’re on, Munk.”
Jolly shoved her fingers to the mussels in her belt pouch, a handful of grating shells that at the moment were completely useless. She would have had to lay them out and then call up a pearl—all things that took much too much time.
“Don’t do it,” she said to Munk.
“He wants you to stay with him,” said Aina. “Isn’t that so, Munk?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You can force her to do that,” said Aina. “You must only want to.”
“You already tried that once before,” said Jolly. “To force me to stay, do you remember?” Pe
rhaps it was wrong to remind him of his defeat on the Carfax. But the devil with that! It pained her to see him this way. Despite all their differences he was still Munk. The farm boy who’d fished her out of the water and saved her. Her friend.
Aina lost patience. “Do it!” she snarled in Munk’s direction. “Or I will do it myself!”
Jolly looked around her. The school of lantern fish danced behind her in front of the gray of the deep sea. She couldn’t expect help from them this time. She must try to think of something herself. She looked down, over the endless carpet of mussels on the ground. Her thoughts felt into the deep, down into the crust of empty shells.
What she felt there shocked her: There was no more magic in those mussels, no sign of their own life or remains of their former power. The Maelstrom had sucked them all out, had taken all their power and misused it for his own devilish purposes. What Jolly had taken for a collection of immeasurable magic was in reality a graveyard. The magic of all these mussels was irrevocably lost. Sorrow clutched her heart. It was as if she herself had been cheated of the most valuable thing she possessed, gnawed down to the bones. And she realized that that was what lay ahead of her and Munk: The Maelstrom would swallow their magic, would consume their talent and their powers and leave nothing of them. It would not be they themselves who would take the places of the Acherus and the lord of the kobalins but their spent shells. That was why the servants of the Maelstrom were dependent on new bodies, for they could not move at all under their own power.
Even that thing floating there in front of Jolly was no longer Aina herself, only an image that the Maelstrom had spit out to deceive them and to mock them.
Jolly felt deeper, under the layer of mussels, to the real floor of the Crustal Breach. And there finally she found what she sought.
The magic strands. The ancient, powerful vein network of the water spinners. Branching thousands of times, it ran through the Crustal Breach, many times intertwined and interwoven.
At the sinking of the Carfax, the spinners had drawn Jolly to them through a tunnel of water that had borne her to their undersea nest as fast as a storm wind. Could they do that again? And would they do it to save her from the Maelstrom—and from Munk?
She tried to grasp one of the magic veins with her mind, but then she was suddenly seized herself and pulled away from the strands. Her link to the spinners’ yarn was snapped like a too-tightly-stretched rope, snapped whip-fast up out of the deep, and paled in the twilight of the Crustal Breach. Jolly shook herself, her vision cleared.
She saw that Munk was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the middle of the emptied mussel sea. He had his eyes closed in deepest concentration.
And she realized something else.
She’d deceived herself when she assumed that all the mussels under her had gone dead. There were still some, only a few, in which power seethed. Munk’s mussels! And among them, the greatest and most beautiful of all—the mussel Aina had given him.
Munk must have laid them out in a pattern before Jolly arrived at the foot of the Maelstrom. He and Aina had lured Jolly into the center of this circle. A pearl had arisen under her feet, just above the ground, hissing and spitting with power—and glowing more than any Jolly had ever seen. Munk could only have made such a powerful thing arise with the help of Aina’s ancient mussel.
Aina smiled, and any innocence was now gone from her face. Her features distorted, turned, formed a vortex that led directly into the interior of her skull. Jolly stared at her and at the same time fought to tear herself away from the sight. But Munk’s powers held her fast, as if he’d wrapped her in a paralyzing crust of ice. Below her the glowing pearl grew larger and larger, now touched her feet and traveled up her body while it inflated around Jolly.
It’s engulfing me! flashed through Jolly’s mind. But not even her panic lent her the necessary strength to resist it.
She tried to speak, but her mouth didn’t belong to her. Jaw and tongue were frozen. Her eyes were only able to look straight ahead, at the rotating maw into which Aina’s features had transformed themselves.
Bright light points rose up to the right and left of Jolly’s vision, were drawn past her. The lantern fish of the Spinners were caught in the suction of Aina’s skull vortex, shot helplessly up to it—and were swallowed. Their light went out in the depths of the gray whirl, and Jolly felt a sharp pain, as if someone had rammed a needle between her ribs. Then the light of the pearl reached her face and enwrapped her. Jolly was now caught in the center of the flaming sphere.
A desperate scream rose in her, blazing fury and hatred for the Maelstrom and infinite anger at Munk, who was too weak or too dumb or simply too wounded by her love for Griffin to listen to her anymore.
He appeared not to have noticed the change that had taken place in Aina at all. Nothing remained of the body of the girl, only a whirling spiral, rotating swiftly around itself. At the lower end, the vortex lengthened to a whipping water worm, which slithered to the mighty Maelstrom column and melted into it. Soon the great pearl would be also caught, with Jolly trapped and huddled inside. She had to watch helplessly as she was sucked toward the vortex, straight into the interior of the Maelstrom.
When Gods Weep
The flood of light pouring over the destroyed roof of the house blinded them all. Even while the worm—or what he had become—was speaking with them, Soledad wasn’t able to tell what he’d really changed into. Only very gradually, as he again cursed and complained that he was hungry and asked if there wasn’t a sturdy tree trunk for a starving god anywhere, her eyes got used to the glittering and glow and she made out what was hovering in the center of the light.
The worm had turned into a winged serpent whose mighty body coiled incessantly in the air, borne by wings that were wide enough to cover the entire attic. Their fanning sent warm, humid breezes over the ruins of the attic and whirled the remains of the web around like snowflakes. The creature’s scales gleamed a dark crimson, almost black. His wings were the same color and thickly feathered, like the wings of a predatory bird; they were set in the upper third of the serpent body, which might measure about twenty feet when stretched out, although all the coiling and whipping made it hard to estimate.
Walker let out a roar, and Buenaventure shoved himself protectively in front of the weaponless Griffin. But Soledad stood fast. Inside she was just as upset as her friends, but she had one advantage over them: She’d already met such a creature once. It hadn’t been winged, but it was just as enormous. Even the triangular reptile head was the spitting image of that of the sea serpent of the undercity. Had she not known better, she might have supposed that the creature from the depths of Aelenium had grown wings and flown to the surface.
But for all the elegance and size it was still plainly the Hexhermetic Shipworm who was speaking to them. God more or less, his complaining and cursing was reminiscent of a badly brought-up child. “By the treacherous breath of Tetzcatlipoca, is there no one here who can bring a newly hatched serpent god a serving of wood?” He fell silent, seemed to be thinking, and then expelled a sigh of utter self-pity. “I’ve finished up everything that was lying down in the courtyard, but that wouldn’t even have been enough to satisfy a worm, not to mention—” He broke off, for his slit snake eyes had just discovered Griffin. The pointed head shot forward, over Soledad, wove effortlessly past Buenaventure, and swinging, bent solicitously over the boy. At first the pit bull man looked as if he were going to bash the serpent god’s head away with his bare fist, but then he took a deep breath and let him do as he wished.
“Boy!” the creature exclaimed with concern. His voice sounded lisping and was amazingly like the worm’s, though much more powerful. “What’s wrong with you?” The serpent body made an arc and, without intending it, formed a loose loop around Buenaventure. The gaze of the narrow pupils was again directed at Soledad. “He isn’t dead, is he?”
“No,” she said. “He’s not dead. Only exhausted and wounded.”
The reptile head ducked, then the amber-colored eyes blinked down at Griffin again. The glow billowing around the mighty serpent body now also embraced Buenaventure and the unconscious boy. Soledad almost expected that the light would heal Griffin, but when the creature unknotted itself and unmade the loop around the cursing pit bull man, Griffin hadn’t awakened. The crusted cuts in his side still shone dark red.
“Where’s the girl?” asked the serpent. “Where’s Jolly?”
“Still in the Crustal Breach,” said Soledad. At least she hoped so.
“The Crustal Breach…of course.” The creature’s voice sounded thoughtful, as if he were slowly remembering what had happened before his pupation.
Soledad saw Walker frowning. “By Morgan’s beard, what’s that supposed to be?” he asked undiplomatically, pointing at the winged serpent. The question wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, but then he planted himself in front of the creature, chin raised, placed his hands on his hips, and looked at the gigantic head. “What’s this you’ve turned into, Worm? Looks to me like something you’d find under a stone.”
“Walker,” Soledad warned him gently.
“Zzzssss,” hissed the serpent. Its forked tongue shot out, darted through the empty air, and disappeared again between the scaly jaws. “That would have had to be a bigger stone than you could carry—don’t strain yourself, my friend.”
Was that a warning? No, Soledad thought, probably not. In his old form the Hexhermetic Shipworm had been gluttonous, deceitful, and self-seeking through and through, but there’d been a good heart in his…well, breast.
“I am the Great Serpent,” said the creature, and now he sounded almost as if he were commanding reverence. “I fly on the winds between the worlds and devour the enemies of the Ancient People.”
